This week my older son turns five. That ...is…insane! Where did my baby go? Give me a moment; I need to have a good cry.

Okay, okay, I’ll move on to the real problem. He wants a pony. He thinks with all these acres we have, there’s got to be enough room for a pony. He promises that he’ll feed it (doubt it) and pay for anything that the horse might need (HAHAHA!).

Honestly, we do have plenty of room for a horse, but there’s not enough room on this farm for a horse and my husband. He hates horses.

I’ve ridden a horse a few times and never got too excited about it. It didn’t seem scary, but it didn’t seem like fun either. It just seemed like a lot of extra work when I’d rather be reading. I’m just not a horse person. My husband, on the other hand, did give a horse a try at one point. When he was in high school he bought a horse because, hey, why not. It would be one more excuse to go hang out with his friends. Now when you ask my husband about that horse, he squints his eyes as the anger comes back to him and says, “I hate horses.”

The first time Aiden rode a horse and decided he must have one.

He realized shortly after buying this horse that it really didn’t like him. No matter how nice he was to it, the horse did whatever sneaky thing it could to knock my husband off. His favorite trick was to play nice for awhile until my husband was pacified that he was being nice, not just pretending, then he’d make a quick run to a low lying branch to swipe off his passenger in a flash and tumble.

He was a pretty smart and curious horse. He learned to open an old deep freeze with his forehead. The deep freeze was used for storing bread that my father-in-law baked and sold on his milk route. At first they didn’t know what was doing it, a vandal possibly, until they caught him in the act and realized the vandal was their horse. He would get the lid open, pull out each bagged loaf of bread one by one, and throw them across the yard. After catching him do it, they put a concrete block on top thinking that would stop him from opening it, but he figured out after a couple of days that a good push would knock it off, and he could continue with his vandalizing ways.

After getting unexpectedly whacked so many times by tree limbs and yelled at by his father while throwing out loaf after loaf of bread, my husband decided a horse wasn’t for him. He sold it and decided that horses would never have a place anywhere near him. Yet, my son asks for a pony frequently.

Recently, I have sidetracked him with advertisements of Legos and dinosaurs, so his birthday wishes have been detoured for now. The horse topic comes and goes, so if I can keep him distracted long enough, just a few more days now, then I will be in the clear until Christmas.

By Sannse at the English language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=230547

There’s always a backup plan though. If he keeps asking and begging, we can always get him a puppy because he talks about that often too (and I really want a puppy), and it might be a good starter pet to see if he’s responsible enough to feed and care for a pet on a daily basis. We all know the answer to that one already, but I’m much more apt to take care of a puppy myself, rather than a horse. Puppies want food, hugs, and kisses. Horses just seem so much more demanding. We could also go to the sale barn with Daddy and pick up a Shetland pony for about $40 on a good day. They tend to be the little sale barn orphans because stupid people with little yards think, “Oh, that would be so cute for my little one,” buy it for an arm and a leg from a private seller, then realize that they eat a lot more grass than anticipated, and their little one couldn’t care less after a couple of days. I wonder how nasty a Shetland pony’s poops are. It could be a nice lawn mower. Hmmmm, I might have to investigate this. Either way, I’ll be doing all the work, whether it’s feeding a pony, or a puppy, or a weird little Shetland pony, but more than likely, I’ll just be stepping on even more tiny Legos for the next year. A little sharp foot pain is totally worth it.